To socialize hardware, think about social structure. Communities doing things on the ground are key to the physical activities that people participate in. That’s partly helped by networking – finding out (A) who else is near you who likes the same things as you, and (B) what building and tinkering is going on near you (in case it catches your interest). Uniiverse sounds interesting for that.
It’s also helped by information flow. This is my own focus – the socialized information. I’m hoping we’ll make the most of th possibilities of socialized information, by building a comprehensive library of how-tos, guides, designs and topical info (which is what Appropedia, a wiki for appropriate technology, is about).

I might be that person who only has a hammer and find that everything looks like a nail – but my feeling is that access to quality information, inspiring stories and great designs is actually central to making things happen.

Two stories from recent years got me thinking. (If you know the stories, you’re allowed to skip to the last paragraph.)

1. A British father helped his wife give birth at home. He’s not the first, and won’t be the last, but there’s a lot that can go wrong. You really want to get it right, and if you don’t have a midwife or doctor handy, and you (and the woman giving birth) never happened to learn how to deliver a baby, what do you do? Leroy Smith turned to the web, via his mobile phone. He found a wikiHow article, and by following the 10 steps, he did his part well.

2. Surgeon David Nott had a more complex challenge. A hippo had bitten off a boy’s arm, and faced death within days from infection. An amputation of his shoulder blade and collar bone would save him – but the doctor didn’t have any experience of this unusual and complex procedure, and no one he knew in the Democratic Republic of Congo could help. But a colleague in the UK could help – and did so via SMS. In two very long text messages he explained the procedure, and wished Dr Nott luck. The operation – carried out in a basic operating theater, without the equipment and support the doctor would have expected back home in the UK – was a success, and the boy’s life was saved.

In the appropriate technology for solving a problem, the key component is often information. Whether we’re talking about health services or development, the right information can be the difference between a good outcome and a failure.

I’m inspired to see wikiHow used in this way – as I am with the stories I hear of Appropedia being used in the field. It’s also true that making the best use of expert knowledge, as Dr Nott was able to do, supports good outcomes. Combining these ideas – enhancing ways of accessing knowledge, and making available the best knowledge – continue to guide our mission.

Use open standards and open formats. Do not use PDFs unless you also make it available in (say) HTML. And a wooden spoon to those sites that require specific software, often restricted to Windows and/or Mac. Tsk tsk.

Last Wednesday, I had the honor of presenting on the future of Humboldt (Northern California) Sustainability for the Humboldt Bay Center for Sustainable Living and the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. The presentation was part of a growing movement of community wide sustainability and hopes to catalyze a series of large-scale open space technology style meetings.

This clip starts a few minutes into the presentation, just after I describe that the presentation was made with the help of many local and over-the-internet colleagues. Click the info button to access the introduction (part 1).

Last Wednesday, I had the honor of presenting on the future of Humboldt (Northern California) Sustainability for the Humboldt Bay Center for Sustainable Living and the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. The presentation was part of a growing movement of community wide sustainability and hopes to catalyze a series of large-scale open space technology style meetings.

This clip starts a few minutes into the presentation, just after I describe that the presentation was made with the help of many local and over-the-internet colleagues. Click the info button to access the introduction (part 1).

I had the good fortune to meet William Kamkwamba last Friday night as he and his co-author Bryan Mealer stopped in San Francisco at a private residence as part of their book tour for “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”. As the two took a few minutes to share a bit about William’s life, Bryan referred to William as “Windmill Bill.” Fair enough, except that we soon learned there’s a lot more to William than windmills. For example, he also built crude but effective power switches and even a circuit breaker to protect his home from risk due to the bare metal wiring he had used.

I’ve only just begun reading the book, and yet I’ve already been struck by several ways in which William’s story highlights the power of Appropedia’s vision. William used available materials, mostly from a local junkyard, combined with insight from a high school physics text and a book on windmills, to construct his first windmill a few years ago. William could not then read English, but painstakingly translated some sections of these books with some help from a local library. With his windmills, William has generated power to light his household, and pumped well water to supply his village of Wimbe, Malawi. In the first chapter, William talks about how learning about science displaced a pattern of magical thinking.

The power of ideas and knowledge is immense. William’s initiative and perseverance have fittingly won him a rare opportunity at the African Leadership Academy, where 200 other young Africans have the opportunity to get a phenomenal education. Ideas and knowledge. William certainly had limited educational resources when he first built his windmill. 100’s of millions of others in developing nations, both school-aged and older, have even less. Many are working to expand access to libraries, but the task is huge and hard to scale. However, just as the developing world has been able to bypass the huge investment in landline phone technology, they may have alternatives to physical libraries.

The open license we use is central to what we do. Open knowledge can empower development, sustainability, appropriate technology, emergency management and all manner of progress. This means understanding what an open license is – giving freedom for all kinds of reuse and remixing, not restricting commercial use. This is the kind of license we have always used, as have Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects and many other wikis – and the particular license that we have used is the GFDL, or GNU Free Document License, managed by the pioneering organization (some might say radical) the Free Software Foundation.

However, the GFDL was intended for software manuals, not for wikis – it’s good, but not quite the right tool for the job. The good news is that it’s now possible for a wiki site to convert its license from GFDL to a more suitable license – the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. This has essentially the same freedoms is the GFDL, but also:

Is more practical for making printed works (you can reference the license rather than printing the whole thing);

Has a useful “human readable” summary (at the page linked above);

Has a “mark”, a linked image such as the one you see at the bottom of this page, which helps readers know what permissions they’ve been given, and helps search engines to index pages by permissions;

Is used by many bloggers and other creators of online works, meaning we can share with these more easily.

We in the Appropedia Foundation have been reading, weighing our options, asking questions and listening. It seems clear that the best course is licence migration to CC-BY-SA-3.0, so we are not delaying any longer. We’ve set the 21st of April as the day to convert to the Creative Commons License. This final week is your opportunity to give feedback and insights. We strongly believe this is the right course of action, but you can consider this as a case of “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

(Okay – we wouldn’t tell someone to keep their mouth shut forever, but this really is a major decision, and it’s hard to imagine turning back once we’ve switched.)

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Btw, if you have a WordPress blog, like we do, there’s an easy way to add a Creative Commons mark in the footer: the creative commons license widget – that page says it’s only tested up to WordPress 2.5, but it seems to be working on version 2.71 without problems.

If you make technology appropriate and you make the how-tos accessible, you can get people to solve the problems themselves. They don’t need aid agencies any more. That’s the dichotomy, that’s the problem that the aid sector’s got to face, with this knowledge. It’s got to try and release it, to achieve their mission, but it also means that a lot of their revenue streams, a lot of their purpose will become redundant. And this is generated by people themselves.” Andrew Lamb, CEO, EWB-UK and director of the Appropedia Foundation.